On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

Ok, ok I’m not going to dig out that Michael Fish video (I happen to believe the guy…) but tonight is the 20th year since the Great Storm of ‘87. I’m sure many of my UK readers will remember this event as it was pretty darn horrendous.

Tonight on ITV at 9pm there was a pretty good documentary about the whole affair focussing on a number of affected people and groups, one of which was Worthing High School on their field trip (they were in Chesil Beach, nr. Weymouth, Dorset) and the footage was just astonishing. Especially of Worthing itself, the devastation was just awful.

Thankfully tonight 20 years on it looks pretty calm tonight; but even so–spare a thought for those who lost their lives. Mind you I recall the 1990 storm as being worse; but that might be my memory. But the descriptions of the winds were quite harrowing, evoked something in my mind…writing wise that is.

Anyway, final shot near enough was of a boat that’s down on the beach about 15 minutes from here, same one that sits on the front page of www.worthing.gov.uk actually (which is no accident as I chose it…!) Made a change to hear a perspective from the ‘poor cousin to Brighton & Hove’ for once

I wonder if it’ll be repeated as I’ll record it then. (On good old VHS!)

Note: not having a dig here just being flippant, but Brighton & Hove does get the lionshare of mindshare usually with the Great Storm with regard to the storm.

I’ve been suitably impressed by the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon release candidate that I’ve decided to take a big step. I’m running the distribution upgrade now on my live hard disk. This might be the most bloody minded thing I have done computer wise but using the release candidate on a second hard disk I have had no problems (one regression: the on screen display for backlight brightness on my ThinkPad has now gone…) that I’m just going for it.

I’ll let you know how it goes. One thing’s for sure; I won’t be facing the jammed servers on Thursday, I’ll just complete the upgrade a few days later to the final version.

Leopard, the sixth major release of Mac OS X, is the best upgrade we’ve ever released

Steve Jobs (Apple CEO)

Well, it’s hardly a backward step is it? At least it’s not claimed to be revolutionary in this press release; although I’m sure it’s being shouted from the rafters somewhere.That said, lots of things in this release of OS X that others could take note from but I don’t think this is going to offer massively compelling reasons for users to look away from Windows; at least it gives the user a consistent interface.

There are some nice new things in OS X Leopard; so maybe we’ll see them appear elsewhere; such as the nice management for virtual screens (Spaces) Gnome and KDE have had for a long time but don’t have as good management of windows on them.

Should be some interesting reviews coming our way, the iPhone proved to have some pretty controversial reviews; some of which have since been reneged on.